


Fabulist

by inlovewithnight



Category: Hornblower (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-01-28
Updated: 2008-01-28
Packaged: 2017-10-17 21:34:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,648
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/181379
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inlovewithnight/pseuds/inlovewithnight





	Fabulist

Even as a boy, Archie Kennedy was a liar.

It was a family tradition, bred in the bone, or so his grandmother told him. She would smudge dirt and ashes across his face with her thumb, make him up to be the saddest ragamuffin she could manage, hand him a basket of something fresh-baked and warm and good, and tell him to go out and not come back until the basket was empty and he had a handful of coins and a headful of stories.

He'd start off from his father's inn-- his father's very well-kept and cozy inn that maintained them all in an entirely respectable fashion-- and run up one street and down another, expertly making himself a beggar child, all piping, whining voice and wide blue eyes. He was the type of nicely plump and slightly too clean beggar child the passers-by of quality could feel quite pleased with themselves to give a coin and take a pastry. So long as he stayed away from the genuinely poor who would be more than happy to relieve him of his take and his teeth, filling his grandmother's expectations was easy as a song.

It was a game; all of his life was a game. He lied to the people in the street, and he went back to the inn and sat on his stool in the corner of the kitchen and told true stories mixed with false, which only his grandmother could ever tell apart. She would tug his ear and tell him he was a Kennedy through and through.

Whenever they had a chance, she would wipe his face clean instead of dirty, put on her best dress, and they would go tell lies the other way, playing richer than they were among the playhouses on Drury Lane. The actors moving across the stages were everything he could ever dream of being, beautiful and magical and far better than he was. For the moment.

Give him time.

The world was a _lovely_ game, one to which he knew all the rules, and those he didn't care to follow he was quite sure he could chat his way out of with a smile.

Until the day his father announced that he'd had enough of an old woman turning the boy into a molly. He'd pulled some strings and greased some palms and Archie was going to the Navy.

"You try your games with them, they'll cut out your tongue and beat you half to death," his father said, glaring at Archie across the room as the boy packed up his things and nursed the bruise on his cheek, for once holding his tongue.

Archie wasn't so sure about that. From everything he'd heard, sailors would appreciate a good story most of all.  
**  
It turned out to be a great deal more complicated than that.

They _did_ appreciate a good story, most of them; he quite easily could have been a prince among midshipmen, passing his duties back and forth among the others with a quip and a smile. His skill serves him well enough in covering his own arse until he learns how to find his feet-- what things are called, how they work, the way of things-- only as soon as he finds his feet they're swept out from under him again, because he learns _the way of things_ , and the way of things is Jack Simpson's way of things, and Jack doesn't care for stories, doesn't want to hear a single word Archie Kennedy has to say.

Lies become something else entirely as the world shifts and bends and he becomes Jack's boy and the skittering rat among Justinian's mids, the lowest of the low. Lies become a comforting blanket he wraps around himself, the only thing he can claim as his own. He closes his eyes at night and tells himself stories until he slips into uneasy sleep, likely to be broken by nightmares and later by fits. He opens his eyes and goes about his days whispering more stories under his breath, the grandest tales the Kennedy mind can invent, and the most lovely and alluring and false of them all is that he won't be here forever, that it will end someday.  
**  
The Hornblower boy comes over the rail in an uncertain blur of rain and fear and wide dark eyes, and Archie doesn't realize at first that nothing is ever going to be the same.

He's just glad to have someone lower than him at last, someone else to get knocked around and spit on, and he falls all over himself to welcome the new mid to his torment. He shows him around the ship and talks so quickly even he isn't sure which of it is truth and which is lies, and if Horatio were slightly less terrified and frozen and miserable, Archie would be tripping over those stories for years to come. As it is, they never do manage to haunt him, though so much else from that day does.

The most significant thing being Horatio himself, of course, who becomes woven into Archie's life snug and neat as yarn chasing the needle. Horatio watches, and he listens, and almost out of pity Archie begins to take more care in the blend he offers of truths and tales, because it's painfully clear from the start that Horatio will take every word on faith. Spitting on the faith of others is poor form, so Archie tries to confine his stories to those things that are harmless, and those that will make Horatio's eyes widen with wonder instead of fear.

Archie is a liar. He is not cruel.  
**  
El Ferrol proves to be more than even the Kennedy mind can overcome. After the oubliette, his mind is still and barren; even the comforting tales that sustained him on Justinian are gone. The silence within matches the silence of the cell, and he loses himself in the empty space that wants to swallow him up. Let it. What reason is there to not?

It nearly works. He's well on his way to a quiet and ignoble death of despair and apathy, and then there is Hornblower again. Horatio. Damn him anyway.

This time, Horatio is the one with the silvery words, the stories of honor and glory, the pretty lies of duty and King and country that keep the Navy afloat. Either he was far more attentive to Archie's example than Archie ever dreamed, or the falsehoods of royalty and admiralty are finer than most, because Horatio obviously believes every word.

And then, to Archie's shock, he also talks about their friendship, as if he believes in that as well. No. Not as if. Horatio cannot say things unless he believes them, regardless of their universal truth. He doesn't lie in the Kennedy way; he lies like a true member of the faithful, in the worship of his choice, the church of abstract principles.

It seems that those sorts of stories carry the most power of all, as Archie finds himself pulled along in the wake of Horatio's belief, back into the light of day.  
**  
Time passes, a thousand small changes and just a handful of ones large enough to make the point that nothing is eternal. Archie serves the Navy, serves the King, pays homage to those dainty abstract principles in their sturdy-seeming frames. They always seem more solid with Horatio by his side, granting them the substance of his convictions.

Ordering his world around that set of stories, committing to them in sincerity, leaves less room and time for the other stories, for spinning fancies out of the air. He chalks it up to maturity and hard-won wisdom; he only regrets the change on solitary nights and rainy mornings.

And then there is Renown, her timbers soaked in another sort of stories, those of madness and delusion, sour and cold even in the slowly-warming sun as they sail west and south. Archie feels as if he's choking on them, being drawn down through the ship's beams into black and foul water.

He used to be a liar. He is a liar, still, under the skin, so he recognizes the falsehoods, their taste in the air, their weight on his skin. He _knows_.

The others dither and question and stall and refuse to admit what he can see as clearly as the horizon. He can't say that he's surprised, though he'd hoped for better from them. Even Horatio, though over the years he's learned very well the precise shape of what he can expect from Horatio, and become comfortable with it in every situation except the extraordinary.

It all falls apart, of course. Lies told by the mad, who convince themselves they speak the truth, can never hold. Only deliberate and knowing falsehoods can support themselves well enough to master a ship, or a nation, or the hearts and minds of men.  
**  
At the end, he is a liar again.

 _"I pushed him."_

 _"It doesn't hurt."_

 _"Better already."_

Deliberate falsehoods, and pure intentions do not make them anything more than lies.

He doesn't regret a one of them, of course. They're to save another life, one he's held dear for longer than he's admitted to himself, and one that, if not worth more than his in the grand scheme, is certainly worth more in the present and the narrow set of circumstances, where he is rotting from the inside and Horatio has a chance to do something of worth with the chances he can give him.

Of course, there's nothing to say for sure that even if he hadn't effectively lost his life on the deck of Renown, he wouldn't have told the same lies, word for word. It does, after all, run in all of that fine, spilled Kennedy blood, this habit of telling stories even into the dark.  



End file.
